I'm a mathematician turned glaciologist, working as a research fellow at the University of Michigan. I've been involved with Kaggle for about a year now, and have had a few good finishes. I have a habit of doing well in the early part of competitions, which has got me some publicity, but doesn't translate well into final results.

I've always had an interest in linguistics (at one point I considered it as a career), but this was the most serious text mining I've ever done.

What made you decide to enter?

Momchil Georgiev. He approached me early on about possibly collaborating, and we decided to produce individual entries first. Somehow we never got around to teaming up, and by the end he'd assembled a big enough team that I decided I'd rather try for a solo run than try to merge. I feel a little bit like Pete Best, who left the Beatles before they became famous.

More seriously, I liked the problem because it's an interesting dataset, and a problem which comes down to a lot more than just number-crunching.

What preprocessing and supervised learning methods did you use?

A lot of the difficulty in this problem was in finding meaningful features in the essays. I spent a lot of time on topic modelling, and looking at distributions of syntactic features. For the final prediction, I used a fairly large ensemble of different methods. Some of the essay sets worked better with boosted approaches, while others were more susceptible to neural nets.

What was your most important insight into the data?

The choice of error metric is really important! Most algorithms are tuned to a particular notion of error, and it helps a lot to tweak things so that you're actually optimising for your target metric. In this case that meant some customisation, as the quadratic kappa used is a little unusual.

Were you surprised by any of your insights?

I was quite surprised how little measures of spelling and grammar "correctness" mattered. Except in one case where the grading rubric explicitly mentioned it, they didn't seem to matter much at all. It warms my descriptivist heart to see that teachers are grading on more than just who can use a spellchecker and a semicolon.

Which tools did you use?

I started out using just R, but introduced Python fairly quickly because of its stronger NLP libraries. There's a good reason that NLTK is popular. I recycled a lot of old R code for various tasks, and used a mixture of custom and pre-packaged models.

What have you taken away from this competition?

The benefits of multiple approaches. I think the winning teams did so well because they were able to combine several independently created models. Also, you can't take a month off from a competition and expect to still be winning when you get back.